Xubuntu 10.4 on Sempron 2400 (full install)

The third and last act of the upgrade season is the desktop computer (Sempron 2400) upgrade. Unfortunately, because my recent switch from Ubuntu to Xubuntu I suppose, I cannot proceed with a regular upgrade. The upgrade process stops after the sources gathering phase with this message.

I so decided to go for a plain install in order to, eventually, have a much cleaner system.

Before installing

Before installation I only had to back-up my home folder since all data I have are kept in the home folder or in NTFS partitions that will remain untouched by the installation process.

I then downloaded Xubuntu install disk image from its download page and prepared a boot disk on a 1GB USB disk using Ubuntu's boot disk creator.

Upgraded the EEEPC 900 to Ubuntu 10.4 (NBR)

The big upgrade season has, at last, arrived. The first computer I decided to upgrade to the freshly arrived Ubuntu distribution is the EEEPC 900.

Night-time upgrade process

Tuesday night, the 29^th, I noticed the “New release available” button displayed in Ubuntu update manager. I so decided to start the upgrade process and to go to sleep also because the download process was promising to be quite long (it did take about two hours at last).

Upgraded the PIII550 to Ubuntu Server 10.4

The upgrade season continues: after upgrading the EEEPC 900 I decided to upgrade the little headless server (PIII at 550MHz) I keep mainly as Torrentflux server and for server-side experimenting.

Upgrade process (a little troublesome)

I started the upgrade process, as suggested in this Ubuntu page:

sudo do-release-upgrade --devel-release

The upgrade program informed me that I was upgrading from a SSH session and, once I confirmed, it started with the download of new files (quite a smaller download than standard Ubuntu). Unfortunately I had the bad idea of continue working on my desktop computer (Sempron 2400) and I managed, at last, to have my desktop system locked and the SSH connection, with the upgrading process, lost. (Definitively memory intensive processes like panorama stitching aren't a good Idea while waiting for some important task to complete). As second error I did not use the GNU Screen utility to start upgrade process so I had no mean to recover the lost session. At last I did let the upgrade process to continue until I realized, checking it with the “ps” command, that it was clearly waiting for an user input. At this point I had no option but to restart the computer.

After the computer restarted I launched again the “do-release-upgrade” command (I used the screen command before this time) and the upgrade process resumed exactly from point it was arrived before. I cannot guarantee that you can stop and restart the upgrade process from any point but fortunately it worked from me. The upgrade process continued, with e lot of replace-or-keep-old-file user input requests until it arrived to the final restart and I had, eventually, my little server fully upgraded and working.

Conclusions

The second upgrade has been successful even if with some problems (my fault not Ubuntu's) just one thing: if you are running some important task over an SSH connection never ever forget using the screen utility before.